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The reason this is not optimised away is that it would take development effort to do so but would bring no benefit to anyone.

Telling (the right) people about Delphi and how good it is (or rather: was), was something that has not been done since the very beginning. Not even Borland managed that. They advertised in Development magazines (and later websites), but not where those people who make decisions about the money to buy development tools (the C*Os of companies) would read about it. So when a developer asked his boss for the money to buy Delphi related tools, they had to tell him what it is (and who Borland, later Embarcadero is) and what the value would be for the money, because they had never heard these names. It's even worse nowadays: We see Embarcadero endlessly blubbing on about how great their tools are to developers, but not going into specifics. That's the way you talk to the C*Os of companies, not to developers. But the C*O people do not read these posts because they just don't visit embarcadero.com and the Delphi blogs. So so they still haven't heard these names when it comes to investment decisions. And the developers don't read them because they don't get any interesting information from them.

OT: I know that they shouldn't be compared but when I see the kind of efforts done to optimize many aspects of .NET versions after versions, giving it a very positive image to many (younger and older) developers, I can't see how Delphi could survive once most of us retire if it doesn't bring "sexy" optimizations and promote them. I don't say that this particular one should be implemented but would it be that costly for EMB to hire a full-time developer whose sole task would be to improve performances here and there, and actually blog about it, instead of hiding everything until release for whatever reason ? I believe that this could create a lot of positive feedback and could attract developers intrigued by this "new" Delphi language that they've never heard about 😉